Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan

Lip-Bu Tan: I'm 66, and they put that, well, you should retire rather than take on this hardest job in the industry. And so a couple of reasons. One is this is an iconic company and it's so important for the semiconductor ecosystem and also so important for United States. And so I decided, you know, do one more after Cadence.

Lip-Bu Tan: So I think, when I decided whether I should double down on Foundry or should I get out of Foundry, and I... And there's a lot of voices. A lot of voices in the marketplace, as you can tell. It's very expensive. It's not going to work. But I finally decided this is very important for United States. and also very important for the industry. And I'll give you the idea that we all live through these challenges of supply chain. And it's very important for any of the big company in semiconductor and really have to think about the supply chains. And you have to have a robust and resilient supply chain. You cannot just depend on one or two players in different geographic growth. And so I think more and more people are going to realize making it in the United States is critical.

Lip-Bu Tan: So right now I also look at some new materials. So become going back to the material size or the chemical table. So gallium nitride, silicon carbide, and indium phosphide. So I invest in all three. And then looking at some of this new material, how can we really drive that? And then in terms of packaging, I starting to invest into glass. Glass is a very good heat insulator. So I even invested a venture site called 3DGS. Then I realized that Intel, we have like 1,000 patent on the module. So how the subscript and the module put it together. And we just announced a big program with Indian government to manufacturing in India plus in US and New Mexico. So I think this advanced packaging very important. I also starting to look at artificial diamond. And that's another very good insulator. So I also invest into, diamond foundry. And that's something is a next generation to look at. So new material, new subscript material, and new, design methodology to drive that. So one thing good about being an engineer, you're always hitting the wall, then you find a way to either jump over the wall or you walk around the wall and then to get to the better result.

Lip-Bu Tan: But more important, I look at this, first of all, on the investment side, I always look at where is the bottleneck. What are you trying to solve? For example, I invest in a company called Cradle Semiconductor, Australia Lab. Is this interconnect become the bottleneck? So I decided to back and also back Celestial AI in the optical side. And then because speed become more important in the interconnect in the cluster. So I think optical become very important. Look at Jensen. He invest in almost every company is photonic related. And then the other part I'm looking at is, you know, okay, what are the solution that need? Like, for example, we talk about design and then the complexity and also the cost. Can you find some using AI machine learning to drive better design and better solution? So a couple of new startups actually go into the EDA-related areas.